Is empowerment the key Pirate Party value?
If ‘sustainability’ is the one-word wrap up of the green movement, what is the key value of the Pirate Parties?
Rick Falkvinge proposes “empowerment”:
“So I come back to the original question all the time: what has changed, and where are the new lines of conflict?
What I come back to all the time is that monopolies have been broken. Both legal and formal monopolies (think the copyright monopoly, patent monopolies, design patent monopolies) and informal monopolies (notably the monopoly on truth, news reporting, and what culture we are exposed to). Monopolies that have previously been reserved for the elite of society have been totally shattered — the citizens have become empowered.
The key phrase here is that nobody needs to ask permission anymore to make their opinion heard, to partake in society, or to create culture. This, I feel, is at the root of the conflict, and what causes the old elite — the ancien regime – to come down so hard on the new technologies. It used to be, that if you were part of the unwashed masses, you needed to filter everything through society’s elite in order to reach the rest of the masses.
That way, this elite held an eff
